Manoela Carpenedo, Assistant Professor and Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen

Manoela Carpenedo is an Assistant Professor and Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests focus on Christian movements in the Lusophone World, Sociology of Religion, Religion and Politics, Anthropology of Moralities, Jewish Studies, and Gender Studies.

"Carpenedo has produced a highly lucid and rigorous account that will be broadly accessible to scholars, clergy, and undergraduate students." - Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

"This book renders visible the creativity and newness that we can find today in the study of religion while it deals with a situation in which both the research and those in the field were uncertain about how to name the experience in question. It is praiseworthy how the author dared to face this complex theoretical and empirical situation. The book initiates with the constant demand for definition: are they still Christians? Are they somehow Jews? Are they authentic Jews? Is that even possible? How can they be Christians if they do not accept Jesus to be God, but a human being?" - Religion

"This book renders visible the creativity and newness that we can find today in the study of religion while it deals with a situation in which both the researcher and those in the field were uncertain about how to name the experience in question. It is praiseworthy how the author dared to face this complex theoretical and empirical situation." - Religion

"Carpenedo has produced a highly lucid and rigorous account that will be broadly accessible to scholars, clergy, and undergraduate students. The book strikes an elegant balance between detailing personal conversion journeys and mapping out the broader social trends that are transforming Brazil's Christian landscape. Her very thorough review of the literature on conversion throughout the book will be particularly useful to scholars working to conceptualize their own studies of new religious movements." - Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

"The book shows the enduring influence of the Bible (mainly the HB) in society through the varied application in the life of believers, who, influenced by their context, apply the text in different ways. The book also has the potential of raising many questions about Jewish and Christian identity(ies). I congratulate Carpenedo for her work ..." - Rodrigo Galiza, Berrien Springs, Michigan , Andrews University Seminary Studies

"This stimulating book should be read by scholars interested in exploring the ways in which different religious traditions, which tend to think of themselves as separate entities, are brought together in the contemporary world." - Ira Robinson, Nova Religio

"Manoela Carpenedo's thorough and perceptive study is ground-breaking. First, because 'Judaizing evangelicalism,' a reaction to perceived doctrinal and moral laxity in the evangelical world, may portend further religious transformations, as the huge Brazilian evangelical community fragments and produces new hybrid forms. And, second, because Christian philo-Semitism, much researched in Africa, needs studies like Carpenedo's in Latin America for understanding the interaction between monotheisms in the global South as a whole." - Paul Freston, The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America

"Growing within Brazil and beyond, Messianic Judaism is a very complex and fast-changing religious field that really needs more exploration. Manoela Carpenedo offers a rich ethnography of a fascinating case study within Messianic Judaism. Drawing on a wealth of data gathered through rigorous and in-depth participant observation, her book makes significant contributions to several important debates within the sociology and anthropology of religion—-syncretism in relation to religious revival, conversion and the elaboration of religious and ethnic identities, and conservative gender roles and relations." - Véronique Altglas, Queen's University Belfast

"This gracefully written and conceptualized book is the first truly classic study of a Charismatic Christian group in the process of adopting strict orthodox Jewish practices. Focused on a Brazilian congregation, and exploring in detail how women make the move from a more liberal Charismatic church to a Judaizing one that insists they follow strenuous codes of purity and modesty, this book is also a major step forward in the study of radical religious change." - Joel Robbins, University of Cambridge